Massive rerelease of David Wingrove's CHUNG KUO series

Between 1989 and 1999, David Wingrove released eight volumes in his critically-acclaimed Chung Kuo series. This sequence is set two centuries in the future and depicts a world of 35 billion people ruled by the Chinese, who have come to dominate the world and built vast, continent-spanning cities consisting of hundreds of levels. Real history has been erased, particularly the achievements of the West, and a stratified, rigidly hierarchal society has come into being, enforced by the police and military. The books chronicle the fractures appearing in this society, eventually leading to war.

The series was originally envisaged as a nine-book series, but the publishers dropped the final book, forcing Wingrove to hurriedly to rewrite the eighth book to conclude the series in a manner that did not satisfy himself or his fans. The publishers did minimal publicity for the final book and it quickly disappeared from view, followed by the rest of the series.

However, the Chung Kuo series has now arisen, phoenix-like, from the dead. Corvus-Atlantic have picked up the series and will be reissuing it starting in September 2010. The series has been comprehensively re-edited and re-structured by the author, with five new novels' worth of material added to the saga. These take the form of a completely new prequel novel depicting the rise of China, named Son of Heaven, and a hugely expanded and revised concluding section, restoring the author's original intentions for the series. Over half a million words of new material was written for the new editions. In addition, the existing large books have been broken down into smaller, more economical volumes so that the entire series now spans a mind-boggling nineteen books of around 120,000-200,000 words apiece, somewhere well north of 2 million words and maybe closer to 3 (to put this another way, the 11 Jordan-authored Wheel of Time books come to about 3 million words).

Corvus plan to release all nineteen books over a 44-month period starting on 1 September 2010 and concluding on 1 May 2014. Cover art for the first book:

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Cover blurb:

Britain 2085: two decades after the great economic collapse that destroyed Western civilization, life continues only in scattered communities. In rural Dorset Jake Reed lives with his 14-year-old son and memories of the Fall. Back in ’63, Jake was a dynamic young futures broker, immersed in the datascape of the world’s financial markets. He saw what was coming – and who was behind it. Forewarned, he was one of the few to escape. For 22 years he has lived in fear of the future, and finally it is coming – quite literally – across the plain towards him. Chinese airships are in the skies and a strange, glacial structure looms on the horizon. Jake finds himself forcibly incorporated into the ever-expanding ‘World of Levels’: a global city of some 34 billion souls, where social status is reflected by how far above the ground you live. Here, under the rule of the mighty Tsao Ch’un, a resurgent China is seeking to abolish the past and bring about world peace through rigidly enforced order. But civil war looms, and Jake will find himself at the heart of the struggle for the future.

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Titles for the books:

Son of Heaven, The Middle Kingdom, Ice and Fire, The Art of War, An Inch of Ashes, The Broken Wheel, The White Mountain, Monsters of the Deep, The Stone Within, Upon a Wheel of Fire, Beneath the Tree of Heaven, Song of the Bronze Statue, White Moon Red Dragon, China on the Rhine, Days of Bitter Strength, The Father of Lies, Blood and Iron, King of Infinite Space, The Marriage of the Living Dark.

This is, quite possibly, the single most ambitious release schedule for a series of books from a single author I have ever seen. I suspect the breaking of the series into smaller books will be slightly controversial, although given the rising cost of paper and also Corvus' status as a smaller publisher (although it's hardly a small press) I can also see an argument for it.

However, given that the series' original release is somewhat obscure to modern genre readers, this re-release is akin to Robert Jordan having completed the entire Wheel of Time saga before publication and then had the whole thing rushed out very quickly, something that hasn't been seen before (as far as I know) in the history of the genre. It's an ambitious scheme, and it'll be interesting to see how it goes. If Book 1 doesn't do well, it could be dead in the water before it starts, but given that the original series remains highly critically acclaimed, hopefully it will be a success.

I loved this series, the first 5 books or so were awesome. The characters are some of the strongest in scifi, and the scope of the plot was fantastic. He managed to tell very personal tales about the characters over epic scope. This is one of the few epics where I was happy with whatever character he was currently writing - I didn't find any boring and I didn't find myself skimming to the best story lines. Certain scenes from that series stand out as some of my favorite scenes from fiction. As I think back, a half dozen or so popped into my head immediately.

That said, the series definitely fell apart at the end. He had many (major) plot threads that he just never got back to, and it got really weird when he started bringing the Mars colonies into the picture. Although I appreciate the effort, it's hard to imagine he can fix the awkward Mars storyline, or satisfyingly wrap-up major plots that he let die in book 4 or 5 (like "The Shell"). I may reread the first 5 and then pick up the next few if they get strong reviews - thanks for the detailed update. No matter what, it's nice to see these in print. I strongly recommend the first few to anyone.

Apparently there's been some changes to the set-up, with the decision made to reduce the size of the first novel and use that material as the basis of a second prequel, Daylight on Iron Mountain, that will become the new second novel in the sequence, making for 20 books overall.

Publication dates are also now up in the air, and there may be a delay until Spring 2011. Apparently international sales rights to the books are being discussed but were delayed by the Icelandic ash cloud of doom preventing a foreign rights sales meeting from being held, so that's being rescheduled.

When I read this as a kid back when it came out I loved the first few books and then felt the series started falling apart. I tried rereading it a couple years ago and I was bothered from the start by two factors. First of all the historical premise to stretch credibility to the breaking point - a resurgent China so triumphant that it eliminates all rivals to the point that even their memory and that of the war itself is mostly gone a century and a half or so after their final triumph even though substantial chunks of the white population survive. China also uses nukes extensively in that process, but doesn't suffer catastrophic losses of its own, which is rather unlikely.

Secondly, there are some very creepy racial politics to this series, namely all dark skinned people seem to have been eliminated. This is partially explained by the destruction of Africa and South Asia. But non-whites elsewhere seem to have simply disappeared without any explanation. The historical backstory plays a major role in the books, so you can't simply say he didn't tell us, unless the explanation comes after book three which is as far a I read the second time around.

The current plan for the series is to release the first book, Son of Heaven, as a limited edition hardcover and an ebook at the start of February 2011. The second book, Daylight on Iron Mountain, will be issued in a similar format in the autumn of 2011.

Starting in early 2012, the remaining eighteen books in the series will be released. Corvus's plan is to issue about six books a year, publishing the final volume in June 2015.

London, 2043. Jake Reed is a young futures broker, trading stock on the datascape, the high-tech virtual stock market, one of the best in his field. When the datascape comes under attack from hackers, Reed is called in to investigate who could be responsible. However, the virtual attack is but the opening move in a struggle years in the planning. Cities burn, riots erupt and armies are neutralised as the long-feared collapse of modern civilisation begins.

Twenty-two years later, Reed lives in a rural community in Dorset. Millions have died in the post-Collapse years and the UK is now a patchwork of farming communities. Supplies of advanced medicines and high technology are running low, with no infrastructure available to replace them. But strange things are happening. Waves of refugees are appearing out of the east, strange craft with dragons painted on the wings have been seen in the sky and, on the horizon, a vast structure has appeared and is getting closer. The age of Western dominance has ended and the future belongs to the East.

Son of Heaven is the first novel in the new version of David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series, a science fiction epic spanning 200 years of future history. In Wingrove's series, the entire world has come to be dominated by China, which has constructed vast, continent-spanning cities packed with billions of people and begun to expand into space. Wingrove previously attempted to tell this story in the late 1980s and through the 1990s in eight large volumes, but the series was not completed properly. Now Corvus are republishing the saga in twenty volumes, with a new beginning and ending and a thorough revising of the previously-published material.

Son of Heaven starts the story much earlier than the original first volume, depicting exactly how Western civilisation and modern economic system were destroyed and how China survived the aftershocks to rise to dominance. This is an interesting movie: the original first book started with China's supremacy firmly established and the reasons for its rise consigned to backstory. Here we see it in progress. It also means we are introduced to the world through the eyes of outsiders (Jake and his neighbours and family who are 'incorporated' into the World of Levels) rather than from inside, which is perhaps a little more forgiving to new readers to the series.

On the downside, this means that the methods by which China's dominance was established have to be depicted in a lot of detail, and these methods are somewhat fanciful, requiring a catastrophic and colossal failure of tens of thousands of Western intelligence, military and economic experts across many years whilst still requiring China to have acquired technology far in advance of the rest of the world (particularly the AI and nanotech required start building its massive continent-spanning cities in the space of a few years). Lots of SF is based on far more ludicrous premises, of course, but generally these work by taking place in the distant future with the transition from modern society being a vague or mythological event. Here it's more central to the story and therefore more open to scrutiny. This isn't helped by Wingrove having to take into account twenty years of additional real history (such as China's economic explosion) and then weld it onto the front of his original narrative. Ironically, China's real-life economic success provides a much more reasonable grounding for it becoming the dominant world culture over the course of decades, but using this as the grounding of the story would have presumably required a much more thorough rewriting of the entire series.

Moving beyond this, Wingrove's actual writing is pretty solid, depicting both the high-tech world of 21st Century London and the post-Collapse, almost post-apocalyptic agrarian society quite well. The conflict presented by the latter is handled intriguingly: the 21st Century, money-fixated world of haves and have-nots is shown to be comfortable but also shallow. The post-apocalyptic world initially lauds the absence of pointless materialism but then exposes the ugliness of living in a world where people die of cold exposure in the winter or from very minor wounds a modern hospital would sort out in a few minutes, or where girls are encouraged to get pregnant before the age of twenty to increase the chances of propagating the species. This sort of duality was one of the key themes of the original series, with the conflicts between progress and stasis and the state and the individual being key, but with the various options being presented as having their own benefits and disadvantages.

In the latter part of the book the Chinese finally show up and we meet a raft of new characters. General Jiang Lei is leading the subjugation of England and is presented as an effective soldier but also one with a sense of history and a conscience. He is contrasted against Wang Yu-Lai, a savage and ruthless intelligence agent who is all for rape, plunder and genocide. Jiang is an interesting character whose attitudes mirror many of the conflicts inherent in the series in microcosm. Wang is a caricature and a cartoon villain at best, however, lacking convincing motivation or characterisation.

The contrast between these two characters is symptomatic of much of the book: some excellent worldbuilding stands contrasted against some highly unconvincing developments needed to make China top dog. Jake and Jiang's solid depictions stand against some under-developed characters (particularly women) elsewhere. Respect and admiration for Chinese culture is contrasted against stereotypical elements elsewhere (the 'cold, brutal' Chinese stereotype is played up a bit, even when characters like Jiang are shown to be nothing like this). Overall though, the book is readable and sets up a world intriguing enough to make even the modest wait for the second book, Daylight on Iron Mountain (due in late 2011), feel somewhat disappointing. Whether it's enough to sustain twenty novels released across five years is another question, but we'll see.

Son of Heaven (***½) is a solid opening to a very long epic SF series, overcoming its weaknesses to deliver an unsettling (if implausible) depiction of the future. The novel will be published in the UK on 3 February 2011 as a limited-edition hardcover and ebook and on 1 March as a regular hardcover. American imports of the latter should be available via Amazon and the Book Depository.

As for the Chung Kuo series, uhmmm, it's alternate history sf so I'm totally not interested.

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It isn't alternate history SF. It begins about sixty years from now and continues forward to about 300 years from now.

The confusion may be because in the setting 'real' history has been deleted and replaced with a fanciful version in which China destroyed the Roman Empire and has ruled unchallenged ever since. I think I've seen some reviewers of the original books get confused and think it's an alt-history, but it's not. It's not very plausible (in fact, China's rise to economic supremacy has made the story Wingrove is telling even less plausible), but it's not alt-history.

Chung Kuo 1: Son of Heaven
It isn't alternate history SF. It begins about sixty years from now and continues forward to about 300 years from now.

The confusion may be because in the setting 'real' history has been deleted and replaced with a fanciful version in which China destroyed the Roman Empire and has ruled unchallenged ever since. I think I've seen some reviewers of the original books get confused and think it's an alt-history, but it's not. It's not very plausible (in fact, China's rise to economic supremacy has made the story Wingrove is telling even less plausible), but it's not alt-history.

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To me that would still qualify as Alternate History.

If he's re-imagining real history, past or present, into a recognizable future turned on its head than I don't know how that differs so much from the numerous sf stories where the Nazis and Imperial Japan win WWII?

If he's re-imagining real history, past or present, into a recognizable future turned on its head than I don't know how that differs so much from the numerous sf stories where the Nazis and Imperial Japan win WWII?

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Because the rediscovery of the real history is a major plotline in the books, as it inspires rebellion movements against the government.

Also, whilst not remotely on the same scale, it's something that has happened before in real history, and today in places like North Korea. Rewriting the past to your design and raising generation after generation believing it. A fairly Orwellian idea which seems to work (although it requires generations and generations to fully be effective: even a lot of North Koreans don't really buy it after sixty years).